Upon reviewing the BBL material and reflecting on practice. I scribbled down a few enhancement project ideas which I believe would be of benefit to students & myself:

 

After this week’s workshop and tutorial, I will hopefully be able to finalise which of the three above is more appropriate. 

I taught a Human Computer Interaction module in the summer semester and in the semester that is concluding. In the first case the lectures were online and in the second case the lectures were in person. In both cases one of the aspects that I think could have been better was student engagement.

Two initial project ideas I have to improve student engagement are:

1-Including a short video as part of the second coursework. The second coursework is a group project which consists of prototyping and evaluating an emerging user interface. The assignment is submitted in the form of a report but I think including a short video could improve their learning experience, improve their skills as working in groups, and allow them to demonstrate any interactive content that wouldn't be possible on a written report.

2-Work on a guided project during practical sessions. In addition to lectures, the Human Computer Interaction module involves practical sessions in which students work on topics related to the lecture of the corresponding week. The lab reports from the practical sessions don't contribute to the students' mark in the module and I think that could be one reason why as the semester progresses there is a decrease in participation. I think a way to mitigate the engagement decrease in practical sessions could be by presenting a guided project related to an emerging interaction technology (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, voice assistance, etc.) in which week by week the students work on a different aspect under my guidance. By the end of the semester they would have a working prototype, which would have a mark.

I look forward to this module to keep improving my teaching skills. 

To help enhance the preparation of our students going into placement, I propose to continue teaching my weekly sessions but also include the following:

1.     Presentations specifically targeted towards the ‘knowledge’ and ‘skills’ section of their portfolio, including using Menti software.

2.     Assessment with MCQs and reflection based on the presentations

3.     Visiting Biomedical Scientists from hospital trust laboratories to help teach current practice and expected requirements prior to placement.

 

After this week’s workshop I hopefully will be able to have more of a focus on which to focus on or indeed all three if possible.

Looking forward to meeting you all.

1)     The project would be focused on a Business Skills Workshop delivered by the Accounting Professional Body CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants). The skills workshop’s aim is to develop skills valued by employers; namely communication, negotiating, presentation skills, data analytics, information systems awareness, problem solving etc.

2)      The Business Skills workshop was run last year. The skills workshop however was poorly attended, when benchmarked against other sessions in the module. As part of completing PHE708 and engaging with the pedagogic literature as part of PHE708, I found that there is research that suggests that summative assessment can be used increase engagement. This is one area I want to research further as part of this enhancement.

3)     As part of an innovation for coursework 2 on PHE708, I incorporated a reflection on this Business skills workshop into the summative assessment strategy of the module (worth 10% of CW2). As a result of carrying out this enhancement project, this would provide me with an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of this innovation from PHE708.

4)     I received feedback from the students that did attend the session last year, that they found the workshop of great benefit and really enjoyed the session. As part of this enhancement project, I would also look to collect data from the student’s post-workshop. I could also compare attendance at the session in this academic year to last academic year, and assess how engagement with the session has been impacted in this way.

5)     The Business Skills game looks to incorporate ‘active learning’, ‘collaborative learning’ and looks to develop digital literacy of students. These themes could also be incorporated and evaluated as part of the enhancement.

My name is Aftab Ali and I'm a Lecturer in the School of Computing. I teach Pervasive Computing to MSc students. For the past 3 years the teaching team on Pervasive Computing have been continually developing the practical content for the module. This content has proven to be critical to meeting the learning outcomes of the module. Until now, the content has relied on proprietary hardware (Shimmer 2R) and Software (MATLAB). Whilst this facilitated easy management of the practical sessions on campus and provided simple tools for students who had not programmed in a while, it has somewhat limited the transfer of learning to different settings. Furthermore, relying on these typically expensive platforms, with Shimmer for example costing around £270 per unit, made the remote learning situation we found ourselves in near impossible. Therefore, moving to a more open and cost-effective platform for the practical content was seen as the most suitable solution. Moreover, from the feedback last year, we now decided to deliver the module using a single programming language (i.e., Python). 

This time, I will transform the MATLAB and Shimmer practicals to use more contemporary Software (Python) and Hardware (Arduino) tools to further enhance the student experience and learning on the module. This will give the students an opportunity to get experience with cutting edge Machine Learning frameworks and how to deploy created models on resource constrained devices from Arduino. Given the Open nature of these tools, this experience will allow the students greater flexibility within coursework, as they can now build solutions using a variety of sensors and are not limited to the tools provided by a propriety solution. Furthermore, the use of more open and contemporary software allows students to develop increasingly sought-after skills from industry. Moreover, I will proactively use the concept of week-0, where I will develop some videos and step-by-step tutorials for setting up the environments for the experimental work. This will help me in tackling the students with different background and learning environments. 

 

 

Currently, the class lecture sessions and seminars address a variety of different career pathways and elements of professional practice, the field of photography with video ranges widely from independent creative practice to commercial practices. If students decide to pursue a more unusual pathway (e.g. medical photography, travel photography) they don’t have the opportunity to get catered advice or one-on-one time in the current module design. 

 

The course director has informed me that there is a budget to invite practicing professionals to speak to the students. My pilot idea for this is to identify three main career plans within the student group and to invite professionals that align to each group. The 3 professionals would present a panel on their professional practice, before splitting into 3 smaller groups for an informal advice session where students are able to ask questions. At the moment, there are no external voices coming into the module and this limits the career pathways the students are exposed to.

 

This is based on student feedback from both 1^st and 2^nd years where they were asked how modules I taught could be improved and what was particularly successful:

"This module could be improved through more group sessions, splitting the class up and discussing things with each other"/ " a scheduled one to one at the end of the semester before hand in."/ “The task in small groups helped a lot to learn about different opinions and views. I really liked that we were separated in two groups for our photo series. Like this The teacher could focus more on the students"/ “I preferred when the class was split in two for group tutorials because having a smaller group made me feel more comfortable speaking up.”